Garbage Bag Urban Art Animals Animate NY City Streets

By Dornob Staff

What better place than the streets of New York City to try and spook the seen-it-all pedestrians into experiencing a new form of street art? Joshua Allen Harris is an artist who has found a way to work with urban conditions, take advantage of cheap materials and exploit available situations to make ingenious head-turning works of art.

In some cases, he manipulates the surroundings of a work to play with site and illusion – like splicing a segmented dragon form so it appears to be diving in and out of the metal grates on which it sits, or facing off two monsters that – as air movement varies from place to place – seem to be gaining or losing ground.

In other cases, he sets out simple animals by themselves or in parts that inflate and deflate at intervals, looking one moment like another piece of urban debris and the next like a real animal come to life. Whether or not his selection of the polar bear was an environmental statement, however, remains unknown.